NicheBlaster.com

To say that there exists a love/hate relationship between the eBay Partner Network (ePN) and its partners is not an exaggeration nor resorting to a worn out cliche. Many ePN partners are thoroughly disgusted with ePN at present. Case in point: just this past week, there clearly was a reporting issue where transactions (Winning Bid Revenue and Buy It Now events) disappeared for several days from the downloadable transaction report. ePN has yet to address this issue on their partners’ forum.

There was also a delay in stats reporting at the end of last month. This happens occasionally and can easily be forgiven, but what made matters worse, was the message in everyone’s dashboard that read stats would be fully updated by “June 31″. Even a leap year wouldn’t help in this case and the message remained in place for several days. It seemed like no one really cared enough to correct it.

ePN partners have become so used to this thing happening that any drop off in their reported earnings throws them into full on panic and paranoia mode.

In fact, just last month, there was another reporting glitch where bunches of clicks went missing. ePN was fairly prompt in acknowledging this hiccup and promised a rather generous “Make Good” in the next payment to affiliates. Of course, this was then followed by another reporting hiccup early this month. It’s almost becoming like an abusive relationship at this point with some affiliates even yanking their ePN links in favor of AdSense.

The unpredictability with the program (mainly the tracking) is what causes affiliates to suspect that every dip in their program stats is the result of a screw up on eBay’s part. What’s even more troubling, is that things seem to be getting worse. Not only do the glitches seem to be more frequent, but the silence in response to them from ePN staff has grown almost deafening.

But this is where I would like to stop in my criticism of ePN.

It is what it is: a great affiliate program that has been battered and bruised over the years by more than a few reckless and greedy affiliates. Hence, the transition of management of the affiliate program to the in-house ePN program followed by the conversion of affiliate compensation to the “Quality Click Pricing” (QCP) model. A model that to this day confounds most partners as to how it actually works.

So then what’s so great about ePN that a ton of affiliates still promote it including yours truly?

Just a few of the highlights:

• An almost endless supply of product categories and products to promote.
• Easy to place product data feeds on your sites using either the RSS Widget or the eBay API. Compare to other physical product affiliate programs that use the difficult to implement
  XML file data feed method.
• Though the tracking screws up from time to time, there is usually an effort made to compensate affiliates. It may fall short of full compensation, but it’s the thought that counts.
• Unlike a lot of the CPA networks, there are no caps and you always get paid if your traffic meets the quality threshold for compensation.
• Their shit converts. It’s probably the easiest affiliate program to get at least a few conversions almost every single day (using it as the basis of sustainable income model is another story (post) all together).

I like to use ePN as the foundation of my Niche Blaster Method to uncover hidden product niches that are proven to be in demand and that prove to convert by sending paid traffic to eBay listings. Sure there’s also Amazon and a few other physical product affiliate programs, but so far I’ve found ePN to be the easiest to work with and the most appealing to the traffic I drive to it.